coloured popcorn?

[diane]

I tried googling for this and just got lots of information about artificially colouring the kernels.

I want to know about naturally coloured ones.

I assume that coloured kernels will show some of their external colour when they are popped.

Are there any popcorns that have a coloured interior?

[steev]

Good question; seems unlikely.

[raymondo]

Various shades of yellow and white I'd guess.

[DarJones]

Popcorn has starch in the interior which can be either pale yellow or white when popped. I am not aware of any popcorn that has a popped color other than white or yellow. I can think of one cross that should result in pale purple popcorn but I don't think anyone has ever tried to make it. There are many varieties of popcorn that have colored aleurone which is the thin layer of tissue immediately beneath the kernel husk. There are two multicolored varieties listed by Glenn Drowns. I provided him with Jones Multicolored which has the best overall mix of colors, however, it does not pop greater than 20 to 1 volume and usually is more in the range of 10 to 1. It tastes very good with a crunchy nutty flavor, but in terms of volume, it won't win any prizes.


www.sandhillpreservation.com/catalog/corn.html

[blueadzuki]

By an large, yes. All of the color in a popcorn kernel is usually found in either the aleurone or the pericarp, both of which are incredibly thin layers (one cell deep except in rare cases). Plus, a lot of the organic pigments that color corn are destroyed by heat in cooking like this, so you tend to get shades of mostly brown from those layers after popping anyway.

There is however, one BIG exception. It is extremely rare, but there is a trait in corn that causes purple pigment to appear in the EDOSPERM and a kernel of that when popped WILL be sort of lavender. This one showed up last year during my pop tests.



The problem of course is that that trait IS rare (this is the only popcorn kernel I've ever seen that had it, up until then, I'd only seen it from time to time in some of the purple kernels that show up from time to time sprinkled in the Andean corn that the bodegas sell for cooking.) Plus, of course, you don't know it's purple until it's popped, by which point, the kernel is no longer viable for planting (it't not like all purple kernels have the trait, they don't  and since the hard starch of popcorn is transparent, a kernel that is white endospermed and purple aleuroned will look the same as a purple all the way through one in a light test.) The only way I could think of would be to use a tiny drill of some sort (tinier than anything I have, given a popcorn kernel is so small) to take a core sample of the endosperm of each kernel and then see if it's purple.

At the moment the best I can do in trying to get such a strain (yes, I am trying to) is to plant any of the aforementioned purple Andean kernels I can get (which are big enough and soft enough I can use an exacto knife to slice a bit of the endosperm off to take a peek inside (soft starch is opaque so once you get through the aleurone, what you see is what the inside looks like), plant any that look purple, HOPE that some of those make some pollen (with Andean corn in the Hudson Valley, a real long shot) and then hope I can get that pollen into a popcorn (or whatever other kind I am trying, I've been toying with the idea of a purple endospermed sweetcorn too.)  

[Joseph Lofthouse]

blueadzuki: What a wonderful finding and project. Thanks for sharing. I sometimes use sandpaper to get through the pericarp and aleurone so that I can peek at the color of the endosperm.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

This is the most colorful popcorn that I have found. It's also from South American. Comparing it to a typical North American popcorn (on the left).

[blueadzuki]

Jan 6, 2016 9:49:09 GMT -5 Joseph Lofthouse said:

blueadzuki: What a wonderful finding and project. Thanks for sharing. I sometimes use sandpaper to get through the pericarp and aleurone so that I can peek at the color of the endosperm.

That works OK if the corn is flour dent or something else with a soft starch component, but for sweet and really glassy flint it's hard to tell when you are looking AT the endosperm and when you are looking THROUGH it to the aleurone on the other side.

Oh and before anyone asks, no, as far as I can tell, purple endosperm and purple germ are not linked, I've often seen one without the other

[diane]

So first we get stable colourful flours, then try for the popcorns.

[blueadzuki]

That seems reasonable. Though I seem to recall Carol saying something to the effect that sweetcorn is often the easiest to cross into popcorn (especially P group popcorn). I'm not saying that it is always so (I keep thinking that, if sweetcorn and popcorn cross so readily, I'd see a LOT more sweetcorn "accidents" on miniature popcorn ears than I have in my life.) but it could be.

The imperative word here is "stable". As I said, most of the purple kernels I have seen have been in Andean stuff, which is probably the WORST place for ANY gene to be if you want to move it anywhere else, since there are so few places that have the conditions needed to grow that kind of corn reliably outside of the Andes, or even get it to the point of making enough pollen to make crossing an option.) That one popped I showed surely originally came out of the "mini cobs" I had picked up at a certain Farmers market stand (whose corn is notorious for showing gene combinations that one rarely if ever normally sees, indicating it's probably super mixed up.) But that stand had no corn this year, and unless the purple is really good at hiding, none of the ones I still have have it either (I tend to work from the assumption, based on what I have seen, that a kernel with spots on a white or yellow base pretty much HAS to be white or yellow at the core, I have seen no evidence of a purple cored kernel with enough white near the surface to mask it's color. Not all purple looking kernels have purple cores, but all kernels with purple cores look purple* And even the Andean stuff is harder to find than it used to be, the amount of colored material that sneaks through the packing process for the stuff sold for food is getting smaller and smaller. I even thought to check the Baker creek Explorer stuff, but it seems solid purple is one of the few colors Joseph DIDN'T find on his trip, all the purple stuff is mottled (pretty, but not good for this project, and I already have a ton anyway).

*though oddly the degree of surface purple seems not to matter. I have had just as many (if not more) purple cored kernels whose surface color was a weak blotchy purple as ones which were a flat deep shade. So long as the whole surface is SOME shade of purple, it seems possible.

[diane]

Jan 6, 2016 7:00:33 GMT -5 DarJones said:

There are two multicolored varieties listed by Glenn Drowns. I provided him with Jones Multicolored which has the best overall mix of colors,
www.sandhillpreservation.com/catalog/corn.html

The only one I saw in which Glenn mentioned a different interior colour is "Red Beauty: 126 days. 6 foot tall plants with red kernels. Pops up a cream color with the red hulls showing " or did I miss one?

[diane]

Jan 6, 2016 18:24:47 GMT -5 blueadzuki said:

there are so few places that have the conditions needed to grow that kind of corn reliably outside of the Andes, or even get it to the point of making enough pollen to make crossing an option.)

Are there any generous growers way south of us who could mail some pollen north?

[blueadzuki]

Jan 6, 2016 18:38:18 GMT -5 diane said:

Jan 6, 2016 7:00:33 GMT -5 DarJones said:

There are two multicolored varieties listed by Glenn Drowns. I provided him with Jones Multicolored which has the best overall mix of colors,
www.sandhillpreservation.com/catalog/corn.html

The only one I saw in which Glenn mentioned a different interior colour is "Red Beauty: 126 days. 6 foot tall plants with red kernels. Pops up a cream color with the red hulls showing " or did I miss one?

I think the other may be Puebla, the copy for that says "Pops up in a variety of colors". It doesn't really.

I wonder if corns that pop up cream are ones that have very high amounts of Beta carotene. Joeseph, you were playing around with those I think, care to comment.

I don't know the answer to that. Corn pollen doesn't last that long un-refrigerated/frozen so shipping would be an expensive or dicey proposition. Theoretically, I imagine an actual university or private corporation could do it (actually a private corporation that put their mind to it could probably rig up a climate controlled greenhouse big enough to fit 200 or so corn plants to produce pollen and silks in situ) but for a private individual..... I don't know.

And even the most Southern of the US is not reliably long enough to always work; just ask Flowerweaver.

To be brutally honest a lot of what I am doing with this now is best described as "stockpiling in trust". Whatever purple Andean kernels I CAN find are going into long term cold storage; to keep them good as long as possible. At the same time, whenever someone here (or on any other gardening forum I belong to) says they want to try their hand at Andean corn, I send them the white/ yellow leftovers from the stuff I picked the coloreds out of (the color should not have an effect on how well they grow, I'm pretty sure most of the coloreds were/are colored kernels that showed up on otherwise white or yellow cobs* and then wait to hear from someone saying "They grew great for me". When that happens, I'll see what I can do about having them take some of the stored stuff. It's basically the same plan I use with distributing the short season rice beans; if you ask me for seed, you get flat red (the commonest color). Once you prove they grow stably for you THEN I am willing to talk about letting you have the other colors.)

I am also watching the corn in the Baker Creek Explorer series site VERY carefully, to see if anyone has a review that actually says they got corn back, and make a note of where that person is.

*In fact, I'm almost sure they do. Way back when (like fifteen years ago) I actually stumbled onto a store that had a quantity of Andean corn that was STILL ON THE EAR being sold as Indian corn for the fall (no I don't know why or how) and pretty much all of the ears looked just like that, a few colored/speckled kernels (never more than 40% usually around 10-20%) surrounded by "normal" white ones (unless it was a colored pericarp ear).

[flowerweaver]

I'm going to try my hand at growing the Andean corn out again this year blueadzuki. Last year I got two stalks to tassel but the rain kept the pollen from transferring to the silking Morado Potolero next to it. Those plants did not form normal ears (recall, I got those odd multiple-in-one mutant ears with no kernels).

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Here's a photo that demonstrates the full color pallet that I find in the popcorn that I have grown.

The North American popcorns are various shades of white with a hint of yellow sometimes (which I think is from the carotenoid zeaxanthin). The South American Cateto population pops up more yellow (I think from Beta Carotene). I haven't yet found a popped kernel that was lavender. A little breeding would go a long ways towards enhancing the orange color in my Cateto population. I don't know if I will work on popcorn this year. Flour corns seem like the more valuable crop to me.